Juvenile Justice Reform: Can We Break Free of the Punishment vs. Rehabilitation Argument?

Juvenile Justice Reform: A Recent Scholarly Paper Spotlighted

Last fall, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice's Justice Policy Journal published an interesting paper on juvenile justice.
It identifies four dominant "conceptual contributions" to the field. Most of these will be familiar to you already: punishment-as-deterrence, traditional rehabilitation programs for "troubled youth", and evidence-based programs. The fourth conceptual contribution is the recognition that reform inevitably fails if core services are not drastically rethought and reorganized. Otherwise, new programs and services are inevitably marginalized by the people in existing organizations.
 

The Anthropology of Juvenile Justice: A Strengths-Based Approach

The author of the paper is Morghan Vélez Young, a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology of Education program at Stanford. She argues that none of the four "conceptual contributions" can effectively address juvenile crime.
Based on anthropological research (some of it done in justice settings), she suggests that juvenile crimes aren't something that are committed by individuals alone -- i.e., "juvenile delinquents". Instead, she argues that everyone in our society contributes to juvenile crime, through their attitudes, roles, and interactions with others. Addressing juvenile crime, therefore, requires rethinking everything about the system -- including the youth who are there. And that starts with trying to break out of the old punishment-vs.-rehabilitation debate.
I can't really do her argument justice, since the paper is very brief (and my own anthropology degree is fairly dusty). Regardless, I found her approach deeply strength-based. She points out, for example, that the moment we label teens as "delinquent," we tend to think of them as essentially different from non-delinquents. Furthermore, we reduce them to their criminal acts, and build programs and systems designed to address only that aspect of who they are -- we ignore what she calls their "moments of glory."
For a much better overview about Vélez Young's paper and what it means for juvenile justice professionals, I recommend a post on the Wisconsin Council on Children & Families blog, which is where I found out about it. 
 
Research from a Success Story

One final note. Vélez Young struggled with drugs as a teen and was once in the juvenile justice system herself. At least, that's what I infer from a 2007 interview she did with Stanford magazine. (If you follow the link, scroll way down for her quotes.) As she said there, "'I was in trouble a lot, because of drugs and my own mischief ... But sending me to detention did nothing. I only wondered, 'Couldn't I be treated differently?'" 
Great question. 

Related Posts:

• Check out this post, "Breakthroughs in Crime Deterrence: Stopping Youth Violence and More," to see how some communities have learned to stop youth crime before it occurs.
• Here's another post that discusses how framing violence as the fault of the individual dismisses the environmental factors that influence violence.